Do Security Strategies Matter?: An Investigation of East Asian and East African States’ Responses to Emergent Regional Security Challenges

This objective of the Capstone project is to assess the helpfulness of strategy in military responses to external threats. The team reviewed the security and defense responses of countries located in two regions, namely East Asia and East Africa. The external threat for the former is Chinese's assertive security policies since 2010, while the security challenge for the latter is the rise of Al- Shabaab in Somalia from 2007.

The primary methodology is the case-study approach. The team determined the case studies based on the following criteria: 1) the availability of data from and about a given country’s defense department to assess responsiveness (e.g. defense budgeting, published strategy or other indicators), and 2) an appropriate mix of countries that have published security strategies prior to the shock versus those that have not. This information has been collected through, but not limited to, various assessments of changes in defense force structure, redistribution of defense resources, changes in defense budgets, how defense funds are allocated programmatically, force deployments and assessments of readiness and training.

The team then selected relevant country case studies to be included in the analysis and categorized them into the control and treatment groups, so as to determine the effect of usefulness of strategy on military responses to external threats.